


NICOTINE STAIN OF A HUMAN BEING.

by falciente



Series: how joseph kavinsky was an oil spill. [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Handjobs in a car, M/M, NSFW but not explicit, One-Sided Attraction, One-Sided Relationship, Sort Of, gansey is just mentioned, he isnt a part of the actual fic, i feel like this was a fever dream, its more poetic than that because im a sucker, k is obsessed with ronan, ronan isnt obsessed with k
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 14:13:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21162968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falciente/pseuds/falciente
Summary: Kavinsky leans back just slightly and Ronan follows, and he realizes just moments after that it’s what he wants, that mild chase. Kavinsky is breathing smoke into Ronan’s open mouth and he can feel it curling in his lungs like the Mitsubishi is on fire.“Sometimes I feel like a fucking god, man,” Kavinsky breathes. “And it feels so fucking good.”“You aren’t,” Ronan rolls his eyes, and he thinks, if you were I could never tell you no.





	NICOTINE STAIN OF A HUMAN BEING.

**Author's Note:**

> this is totally self indulgent and meaningless, but it sounded pretty nice in my head. this doesn't take place at any specific time other than before the fourth of july party.
> 
> feedback is always valued, privately or publicly! kudos is appreciated just as much if you enjoy the things i write! per usual, thanks for reading. <33
> 
> EDIT: this is now part one of a series that will be somewhere around three parts, unless i get carried away, which is probable.

Every inch of Ronan’s clothing clings to his body with sweat, and the cool air chills each dip and curve that composes his shape, each footstep slamming into the asphalt. He lifts a hand and presses one of his earbuds back into his ear, sweatpants pocket zipped against his hip to keep his phone secure. The streetlights on the road bathe the ground in a murky yellow glow, curving sick-tinted light over the edges of his jaw and the folds of his jacket. The pace he keeps is too fast to be jogging, but too slow to be sprinting, and just enough to keep his lungs reaching for air.

The ground hums beneath his feet and he doesn’t slow. Headlights spray light against his back, and he doesn’t slow. He doesn’t speed up, but he tries to avoid acknowledging the car behind him for as long as he possibly can.

The white Mitsubishi curls up on the road beside him like a persistent cat, engine purring quietly beneath a hood that it probably took Kavinsky far too long to perfect, to dream into existence the way that it should have been shaped. The windows are tinted too heavily to see his face until he rolls them down, one wrist cast over the steering wheel, the other hand gripping the center console fervently. 

“Lynch,” he says, as if it means something to Ronan, as if it means half as much as what he thinks it does. 

Ronan doesn’t respond and doesn’t stop; the car edges along beside him with ease, effortlessly swallowing the yellow lines on the road. Just another Henrietta predator that learned from its owner.

“How come you didn’t bring Dick III with you? Not the sporty type?” Kavinsky asks but there’s no true interest in his words. His eyes are dark, oil spills, and Ronan is holding the match unlit above them, refusing to let the world burn. This time, he does stop running.

His shoulders rise and fall with each inhale and exhale, breath fogging in front of his face, akin to the same way the smoke is rising from a cigarette that Kavinsky is holding between his fingers. A cigarette seems like such a mild thing for Joseph Kavinsky. “You’re missing a few of your dogs.”

Kavinsky’s smile is delighted, higher on one side than the other. The car has stopped directly beneath a streetlight and the glow is flooding the inside; there’s a bloody patch on the lower corner of Kavinsky’s bottom lip, the remnants of a bruise on his cheek blending with the yellows of nighttime Henrietta. “Only needed one tonight,” he says, staring directly at Ronan when the words leave his mouth.

Ronan scoffs. He’s pulling the earbuds out and wrapping them around three of his fingers until the white cord is pulled evenly into an oval before he tucks them into his pocket, notably never pausing the music, as if he never plans to keep himself in Kavinsky’s presence for very long. He would always prefer not to.

Kavinsky rolls up the window like he already knows that Ronan won’t deny getting in the car, and he doesn’t. There’s sweat clinging to his jaw, a salty taste on his lips when he runs his tongue over them and climbs into the passenger seat, enveloped in the smell of cigarettes, off-brand alcohol, and Kavinsky’s cheap deodorant with his arm cast over the passenger seat. 

There’s a McDonald’s bag on the floorboard between Ronan’s feet, accompanied by a drink in the cup-holders in front of the center console. “Don’t eat my food,” Kavinsky says.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ronan retorts, slipping further back into the passenger seat. 

The Mitsubishi dominates the center of the road, eating away at both lanes like a nightmare in bright white lights. There are, of course, no other cars to plead for the road with it; Henrietta is dead at night, except for the ugly, because it’s much harder to see how ugly they are in the dark. Kavinsky lives at night, starts to wake up when the sun begins to set. 

Ronan knows Kavinsky well enough to know that there is no meaningful destination at the end of this drive, nor is there Monmouth Manufacturing at the end of it, no security in the small make-shift models that Gansey has composed. He wishes this road were just one in the model, a tiny fake that wouldn’t matter at the end of the night, but this  _ is  _ the end of the night and the road is real. 

Kavinsky’s driving with one hand, swirling his McDonald’s cup around in his other hand, awkwardly close to Ronan’s face. “You can have a drink, though. It’s like an indirect kiss.”

Ronan’s eyes cut over to him in severe annoyance, and he pushes the drink away from his face, but Kavinsky puts it in the holder surprisingly fast, and then he’s running his fingers over the back of Ronan’s neck. Cold spreads over his skin, and Ronan thinks it should be heat, but it isn’t. The world always describes the sensation of intimate touch as warmth spreading like a wildfire in a field facing a drought, but this isn’t intimate, it’s a claim, like stealing from a corner store. Unimportant, but dirt on your reputation.

Ronan’s watching the road because Kavinsky isn’t, the Mitsubishi dancing over the lines, driver’s side tires biting at the grass near the curb. “The fucking road, K.”

Kavinsky laughs and it sounds like windows shattering in a storm, blowing glass inwards, ripping at the skin. 

Ronan looks over at him and Kavinsky is staring directly back. This time, there’s no streetlight to curl a glow over his features; he’s all jagged edges, messy dark hair and dark circles beneath his eyes made even darker by the lack of light, and he’s smiling, teeth peeking over the bloody corner of his lips. The Mitsubishi crawls to a stop in the middle of the road, beneath a single flashing traffic light that flickers from red to green at the same time they stop. 

“Be with me,” Kavinsky says, voice hot and heavy and tilting, dizzying. 

“What’s in this?” Ronan’s inspecting the McDonald’s cup, lifting the straw to his lips, never making eye contact with Kavinsky. He hears him answer “Sprite” amusedly. He expects it to be a lie and is, not pleasantly, surprised to find that it’s the truth.  _ You can have a drink, though. It’s like an indirect kiss. _

One of Kavinsky’s hands stays on the wheel and the other wraps around the side of Ronan’s throat, lips finding skin between them. Ronan brings one hand up and his fingers tangle around Kavinsky’s wrist, never pushing, tight but not relentlessly so, and he thinks he hears Kavinsky say it again. Muffled against skin, aching,  _ be with me.  _

When he doesn’t respond directly, Kavinsky leans up, bringing both hands over. He cups his jaw with one, thumb digging into the hollow just above his heartbeat, the other sliding over the edges of Ronan’s perfectly white teeth. Kavinsky looks at him like he already owns him, but that isn’t enough, like he needs the security of the receipt confirming that he made the purchase.

Kavinsky takes a drag from his cigarette that he’s somehow managed to keep lit and he leans forward, and all Ronan can taste is nicotine for a fleeting moment. Acrid and burning, incorrect and uncomfortable. Their lips are together and Kavinsky tastes the way that he always imagined gasoline did when he was younger, and gasoline is an addiction to everyone. His hands fumble when he places the cup back in the holder between the two of them.

Kavinsky leans back just slightly and Ronan follows, and he realizes just moments after that it’s what he wants, that mild chase. Kavinsky is breathing smoke into Ronan’s open mouth and he can feel it curling in his lungs like the Mitsubishi is on fire.

“Sometimes I feel like a fucking god, man,” Kavinsky breathes. “And it feels so fucking good.”

“You aren’t,” Ronan rolls his eyes, and he thinks,  _ if you were I could never tell you no.  _

Kavinsky leans back in his seat, pale hands moving against the dark jeans he’s wearing, fingers fumbling with the zipper. The dashboard lights spread red light across his adam’s apple when he tips his head back into the fabric, hand resting half-heartedly in his pants, and Ronan has yet to be able to decipher whether or not he’s high, drunk, both, or neither. 

“Really.” Ronan makes it sound more like a statement than a question.

“You wanna do it for me?” Kavinsky offers.

_ No,  _ Ronan thinks, and yet, he’s climbing over the console. He hears the sound of fumbling and a click, and the seat slams itself uncomfortably backwards, away from the steering wheel. It isn’t quite far enough, Ronan can still feel the wheel digging into his lower back unceremoniously, and there’s hardly enough room for his knees on either side of Kavinsky’s thighs without the center console digging into at least one of his legs. He supposes this shouldn’t be comfortable in the first place.

He wraps his hand around Kavinsky and swears that he hears him laugh, airily, as he shifts his legs further apart beneath him. Ronan can’t stop thinking. He wonders if he will ever admit this to Gansey, and immediately decides that he won’t. He wonders if this counts as coming out. He wonders if this is also Kavinsky coming out, or if Kavinsky is even gay, if maybe it’s just an infatuation with Ronan Lynch and the world he could manipulate with him.

“There’s no you and me,” Ronan nearly spits the words into Kavinsky’s mouth when he kisses him. He tastes like McDonald’s Sprite and cigarettes and a mistake, and he groans in response to the words, or maybe it’s the way that Ronan’s moving his wrist. Kavinsky presses upwards, out of his seat, until Ronan’s hand is nearly flush against his hips.

“What do you think this fuckin’ is, Lynch, a therapy session?” Kavinsky laughs against his lips, fingers lacing together on the back of his neck and jerking him forward.

Kavinsky kisses him like it might ignite the oil spill that Ronan saw in his eyes, and Ronan thinks he may have lit the match and dropped it this time. His skin burns beneath the black hoodie, hot to the touch when Kavinsky’s hands travel up the back of it and pull taut, red lines across his shoulder blades. He’s all collateral damage and Ronan knows exactly how he would come out of this situation if it wasn’t for the Mitsubishi, which he has never seen as a blessing up until now, and never will again. 

The Mitsubishi is a time-capsule set to be buried and forgotten; Ronan doesn’t love Kavinsky, he could never love Kavinsky, and vice versa.  _ Statistically _ , Ronan thinks instead of saying,  _ people long more for the touches of another human being in the colder months, and it’s October.  _

Kavinsky groans into Ronan’s mouth and Ronan hates the way that it feels, he hates the way he knows he’ll think about it later, in the driver’s seat of his BMW, in his bedroom, in the shower beneath scalding water. He wants to beg him to be quiet, to never make another sound, and that’s an impossibility for Joseph Kavinsky. He feels Kavinsky’s teeth catch on his lips and he molds himself into the shape of his body, far more than he was allowing himself to earlier. 

Kavinsky’s hands are on his lower back, fingers dipping beneath the waistband of his sweatpants. Ronan fits too nicely against Kavinsky beneath him, closing any of the black nighttime space between the two of them, and he wishes he would die there. He wishes that everything could end after this, and it’s not that he’s self destructive, so much as he knows what it feels like to lose a fraction of yourself to someone else because Ronan has, begrudgingly, done it for years.

It’s the effect that another person’s self-destruction can have on you. In this case, it’s the effect that Kavinsky has on him.

  
“There’s always gonna be a ‘you and me’, Lynch.” Kavinsky mumbles, forces Ronan to swallow the words down. “There’s you and me, or there isn’t  _ shit _ .”


End file.
